The Eudora Welty Society is excited to host its conference for the first time in Charleston, a city Welty visited and photographed. We invite colleagues in Southern Studies, American Studies, and all related fields of study to join us in investigations of this renowned Mississippi writer, her legacy, and her national and international reputation. This conference, held at the College of Charleston, will examine Eudora Welty’s fiction, photography, letters, memoir, archival documents, essays, reviews, interviews, films, and more. Along with presentations of scholarly work, the conference will also offer a Charleston Writers panel, receptions, literary and historical tours, a dramatic reading of a Welty work performed by Welty scholars, plus free time in the evenings to enjoy Charleston on your own.

We invite individual papers on any aspect of Welty’s work. We expect that most submissions will be individual, but we will also consider proposals for complete panels. Topic suggestions follow this cfp. We hope for a wide range of panels and presentations, new scholarship, connections and perspectives. We especially encourage graduate students to submit paper proposals. Please send a 250-word abstract and, if you are new to the society, a CV to ewsconf@cofc.edu by Aug 1, 2018.

Topics might include explorations of

-Memory: how memory is constructed, reconstructed, repressed in W’s work; competing subjectivities in her fiction and the differing memories that result, W’s works alongside other texts that explore similar relationships to past histories, times, places, people

-Attention to history and historical trauma: Jim Crow, the Civil War, the Holocaust, the Great Depression, the Cold War, the 1960s, the effects of American class, gender, and racial hierarchies

-Did the writer crusade? social justice and political issues

-History, public culture, and performance; representations of performers, performances, audiences, and performativity in the fiction and photography

“The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily — perhaps not possibly — chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.” Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings